Capital ships

[Neils Iyssada]

So I was talking with some people about how 1600 meters are small for capital ships, especially some sci-fi references like Homeworld ships that are lengthy or flat, and truly massive.
My old thread about design size is a nice start to understand the problem.

I'll add some picture to make the problem more visible, but for example the Pride of Hiigara is supposed to be a massive mothership 2-3km tall. But once I reduced it down to 1600m, it feels tiny.



So here's the idea : add another spacecraft class, Capital or Titan or Mothership

This class would have bigger size limits (5km seems like a good max) and accordingly bigger file size limit.
It would be limited by an adaptive hard-cap (1 for each empire, 1 per 20 officers, 1 per something ?) to avoid spamming these beasts.
They would maybe replace cities if enough volume was allocated to commodities / ships production.
They would have some malus / limitations, like not being able to land on planets or high maintenance cost.

So if I summarize :

Features

• Bigger physical and file size limits
  
• Spacecraft manufacture
  
• [Commodities production]
  
• [Could maybe be "replaced" by another design after some long cooldown, for making it easy to improve the interior for example]
  
• Badass
  

Benefits

• Huuuuge ships
  
• Can produce ships
  
• [Can produce commodities]
  
• Can make good warships or nice motherships, strategy choice
  
• More server-friendly as it would theorically be worth several warships / cities
  

Limitations

• Some kind of hard cap limit to avoid spam
  
• - like 1 per empire or 1 per x number of officers
  
• Hard limit coupled with a high maintenance cost (money + parts + special ressources)
  
• Highest FTL signature
  
• Some longer warp cooldowns
  
• No planetary landing
  
• [Too big to use any wormhole except intergalactic ones ?]
  
• Would need a volume allocation ratio limit, to avoid huge glass cannons
  

Basically I see this class number limits like Dreadnoughts in Mass Effect universe : due to the enormous destruction power of these ships, Council races can't have more than a said number of Dreadnoughts, numbers that are defined by the race's efforts regarding council space and politics. Except here we don't have a central faction to govern us, but such ships need to be heavily limited.

It's not a well-matured idea, but I wanted to put it down before I forget and move on. I'm open to comments to improve this idea, be it restrictions or features.